[A NOTE FROM HARRY: Here’s a guest post by my friend Dr. Ray Soneira, founder of DisplayMate Technologies, whose display-testing products are widely used by manufacturers and tech publications.]
The article by PJ Jacobowitz “Is the iPhone 4’s LCD the Best?” on PCMag.com with lab measurements comparing four high-end smartphone displays is especially interesting because it has the first published lab results for the iPhone 4 Retina display. Below are my own comments for some of the PCMag article results.
The iPhone 4 is 25 percent brighter than the iPhone 3GS, which was the previous record holder, so the iPhone 4 is now the brightness king for smartphones.
Steve Jobs promised a Retina display Contrast Ratio of 800 and PCMag measured 1097, 37 percent more than the Apple advertised spec. That’s very impressive because you seldom ever see manufacturers conservatively understate their specs to that degree – but then see my widely reported (and often misquoted) comments on the iPhone 4 Retina Display, where it falls short on that spec. The iPhone 4 is a tremendous improvement over the iPhone 3GS, which only had a measured Contrast Ratio of 138. But note that the Motorola Droid remains the Contrast Ratio king of mobile LCDs with 1436, which I measured in our own DisplayMate Lab tests.